POLITICS is all about perception, which will help explain how President Bush can say he was reaching out to all Americans after waging a bitterly divisive campaign to catapult him to a second term.

During an election season when reality took an extended holiday, the results from last week got stuck on the spin cycle. Administration officials have trotted out the word "mandate" as if it were a spoil of war. Conciliation is clearly not part of the White House agenda.

In California, the perception in the press is that our superhero governor is responsible for the passage or defeat of a number of measures to which he was courageous enough to lend his support. The media has played this as if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hoisted the ballot initiatives on his sizable shoulders and carried them across the finish line.

That may be true of his involvement in the campaign against a proposal to amend the state's "three strikes" law. In almost every other instance, though, the outcome had already been predicted in the polls, which the governor no doubt surveyed before giving the thumbs up sign. The state's bold $3 billion stem-cell research proposal was enjoying the kind of statewide support Bush enjoyed in Georgia by the time Schwarzenegger signed on, hardly revealing the governor's "clout" but clearly showing him to be a shrewd politician.

The governor's unquestioned popularity, however, may be linked in part to the belief that he doesn't take himself too seriously. How else to view his campaign to pass an initiative that would stop the state (as in Schwarzenegger) from raiding funds earmarked for cities and counties -- shortly after the governor took almost $3 billion of such monies to offset the state's monstrous budget deficit? It made for great theater, naturally, to see the governor standing alongside the city and county officials whose municipal pockets he just picked, saying that it was time to end the ritualistic robbing.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who happened to be on the short side of a $105 million "gift" from the city to the state, said that his press conference with the governor a few weeks ago to promote the wisdom and merits of Proposition 1A was like watching the outtakes from a David Lynch film. You didn't quite understand it, even though you were there.

"I found myself standing there, not quite knowing what to say," he said. "And then I got up and basically said thank you for agreeing not to steal any more money from us."

Hollywood rarely sees such good material. Schwarzenegger is finding some of his best scripts in the unlikely Central Valley town of Sacramento.

Yet, Newsom is also in the midst of a starring role, where the brainy wonk is being cast as the unlikely villain. His call to approve same-sex marriages in San Francisco is being portrayed as possibly one of the reasons Bush won a second-term -- the moral majority's response to the Sin City surprise.

Somehow all those "activist" judges in Massachusetts who gave the green light to same-sex marriages before Newsom got elected were overlooked, because the video of happy couples exchanging vows at San Francisco City Hall is what allegedly stirred evangelicals into action. Too bad the president's support for a ban on same-sex marriage preceded the commotion, with Bush offering to rewrite the Constitution at the behest of his right-wing crusaders.

San Francisco influenced the national election? Only by showing how out of step it is with most of the country. But that's not news. That's as predictable as Utah as a red (meat) state.

Newsom has also found himself portrayed as a loser because several of the measures he supported fell short, including a $200 million affordable housing bond initiative that won almost 65 percent of the vote. But in a city where nearly a third of the residents automatically oppose anything, a two-thirds vote is not only unlikely, it's close to impossible.

The fact that some 80 people representing various factions, from homeless advocates to developers, signed on to the measure was historic. The perception that Newsom couldn't deliver the clutch hit is way off base. It's the city's byzantine politics that undermined the effort.

San Francisco's grand political experiment this year included a try at instant runoff voting, a system sold as easy as one, two, three when, in fact, hardly anyone can explain how it works. As it turns out, it doesn't, since San Francisco experienced one of its familiar technical failures, leaving some candidates for supervisor wondering for several days whether they won or lost.